Truth to tell

Gena Rowlands is a genuine American Independent Spirit

by Rob Nelson

Gena Rowlands delivers a speech in John Cassavetes's Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) that perfectly captures her -- and Cassavetes's -- alternative approach to cinema. Her character, Minnie, has just seen Casablanca with a friend, and now she's deconstructing the Hollywood agenda over her umpteenth glass of red wine. "You know, I think that movies are a conspiracy," she says. "Because they set you up, from the time you're a little kid, to believe in everything. They set you up to believe in ideals and strength and good guys and romance -- and, of course, love. So you get a job and you learn how to be feminine -- quote, `feminine' -- and you learn how to cook. But there's no Charles Boyer in my life. I never even met a Charles Boyer. I never met Clark Gable, I never met Humphrey Bogart . . . They don't exist, that's the truth."

The truth, indeed. When this year's Boston Film Festival bestows upon Rowlands its American Independent Spirit Award, it'll be the BFF's acknowledgment of an entire career of telling it like it is. Not as we would hope or dream it to be, but as it is. In the last few years, Rowlands has been justly feted by the American Cinémathèque and the Sundance festival, but it's particularly fitting that she's being saluted in this town, which has long been a hub of Cassavetes appreciation. (Ray Carney, the foremost scholarly authority on Cassavetes's work, teaches at Boston University.) Rowlands and Cassavetes, her late husband, worked together on six of what they called "truth-telling movies," which tapped the languorous rhythms of real life within the "dull" moments omitted from conventional melodramas. Perhaps the summit of their collaboration is A Woman Under the Influence (1974), in which Rowlands bravely unveils every possible shade of spontaneous self-expression. By no means "crazy," her Woman character personifies Cassavetes's unusually sane art.

Rowlands once said that working with Cassavetes was "to be loved by a director . . . who encourages you to push into areas you fear to risk with other directors." Particularly in Cassavetes's films, Rowlands dares to reveal the imperfect process of thinking and feeling -- a by-product of the films' improvisatory design, but also a brilliant strategy for portraying characters whose gift is for living in the moment. In fact, this sort of complexity has been central throughout her career. Rowlands has consistently sought to humanize those character traits -- devotion, vulnerability, love bordering on madness -- that too often appear as stereotypes. In the 1978 TV-movie A Question of Love -- a woman-friendly precursor to Kramer vs. Kramer, in which she plays a lesbian battling her ex-husband for custody of their son -- she locates honesty even in the face of dialogue like "Why do they call it gay?" Much to her credit, Rowlands isn't one for irony. She never acts above the film she's in.

Occasionally, this fearless emotional investment hasn't been repaid by the filmmaker. But by choosing to be selective of scripts and directors, Rowlands has managed to establish a consistent sensibility across most of her films, and to play strong female characters far more often than is the norm. She has an unforgettable scene in Lasse Hallström's Once Around (1991) when, playing a gentle matriarch who's pushed to the limit by the antics of an untrustworthy future son-in-law (Richard Dreyfuss), she finally puts her foot down: "So help me I will kill you before I let you sing this song and upset my husband and his family!" Her character's insistence on this point seems at once believable and hilarious, fearsome and charming. American Film named Rowlands one of "Ten Tough Broads" in 1983, perhaps responding to the startling moment in Cassavetes's Gloria (1980) when her ex-gun-moll character, again pushed to the breaking point, unloads a pistol-ful of bullets on some Mafia gangsters to protect a six-year-old orphan -- whom she doesn't much like.

There's an palpable dignity to Rowlands's characters, and to her character in the singular. On screen, she appears smart but not pretentious, principled but not self-righteous, regal but not inaccessible, emotional but not cloyingly so, and beautiful precisely for the realism of her beauty. The other striking thing about the women she plays is how fiercely committed they are to being compassionate people with moral integrity, no matter what the cost. In this way, she's never broken faith with her audience; even her darkest roles avoid defeatism. Her characters strive toward security and happiness, being capable and worthy of it, but not quite there yet.

Rowlands's agenda to inspire is as deliberate as that of any auteur. "One of the big dangers," she told Interview in 1992, "is that we tend to make pictures that don't encourage feeling and compassion for one another -- the technical things are so dazzling -- but film is so well suited to letting you live the life of someone else for a couple of hours and to actually feel what they feel. And the next time you see a person like that person on the street or in a restaurant, you have a softer, better feeling toward them."